Hi all,
Mike here - below are my notes from today's talk and some links you'll hopefully find useful. I'll try to keep an eye on this thread for the next little while so let me know if you have any questions related to today.
Take Aways from the Program
- try a bit of everything, then start to specialize
- develop a network of peers (learn from and push each other)
- complete assignments and move on - each project will be better than the last
- collaborate with those who have complimentary skills
- think about design as problem-solving - have reasons for your decisions
- practice with what's coming, what's established
The Job Hunt
- willingness and ability to learn more important than what you know (junior positions are all about your potential)
- a network of peers is almost essential for getting your foot in the *right* door
- be involved in the community (peers from school, local *Camps, Ignite Events, Refresh Events, FITC, NXNEi, Drupal Users Group, Twitter, Facebook, Dribbble, etc.)
- tell people you're looking (keep yourself in their heads, use their networks too)
- I don't recommend relying in freelance to pay the bills - at least not in the first year
Day in the Life
- "CMS Web Designer" at UofT - everything from one-page brochure-ware sites to large CMS sites for entire faculties, central university services.
- design lead for projects: initial meeting, IA, design, theme coding, support
- other team members dedicated to training, back-end development
- ~150 clients and growing
- ~12 projects on the go at any time
- Proprietary enterprise CMS (.NET), WordPress 3 (PHP), Drupal 7 (PHP)
- balance the needs of the client business (managing the site, required functionality), their users (IA/design), the budget ($5k-$30k for most websites, $5k-$100k for web apps), the timeline (2 weeks - 2 years)
- HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, PHP
- Photoshop, Coda, Firebug/Web Developer Toolkit, VMWare Fusion, IETester
- Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE 6/7/8/9
- Workflow: Creative brief, kick-off meeting, information architecture, pen and paper sketches, wireframes, static mock-ups and/or web prototypes, design meeting, debugging, staging site, client training, content prep, documentation, final tweaks, content freeze, cross fingers, launch
- Atmosphere: small team (4 people total), time management and independent work a must, teamwork also essential for some tasks, projects. Able to communicate with clients, both to guide them through the IA/content strategy as well as developing and defending designs
- Enterprise CMS: Big sites (UofT sees 3,000,000 hits/day), many users (Faculty of Medicine = 200 active site users), fine control over user groups, rolls and workflows, fine control over media and other digital assets, professionally documented and supported, consistent user experience across multiple sites, lack agility, awkwardly integrates community features into an unrelated document management, event management or content management model, closed API (difficult to develop custom plugins/modules for, integrate with secure authorization, etc.)
- Enterprise CMS (Part 2): Solve closed source problems by adopting an enterprise-worthy open source CMS (Drupal). Develop standardized UofT base template and best practices with UofT Drupal Users Group. Develop university-vetted custom modules for secure authentication, etc. For other projects that don't require an enterprise-level solution, WordPress is very agile (quick to set up, design/develop themes for, add content to and launch) and a popular solution.
- Post-Recession: University environment is largely sheltered from the rest of the job market's difficulty. Many people go back to school during a recession - the university focused on promoting itself (promotion requires online presence, new websites, etc.).
My (Hopefully) Useful Links
- http://www.alistapart.com/ <-- great articles
- http://net.tutsplus.com/ <-- lots of tutorials, part of a network of sites
- http://dribbble.com/ <-- constant stream of design work
- http://52weeksofux.com/ <-- numerous lessons on user experience design
- http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/standards/ <-- best practices guide
- http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/information_architecture_tutorial/ <-- IA tutorial
- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1982509/creative%20brief.docx <-- my creative brief
- http://wordpress.tv/category/how-to/ <-- WordPress video tutorials
- Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition <-- If you only buy one book, consider this one
Interview questions: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcxrv3q7_41dr5dktc4
